Read Aloud — Astronomy

The Milky Way galaxy contains an estimated two hundred billion stars, and astronomers believe that most of these stars are orbited by at least one planet. This discovery has transformed the search for extraterrestrial life from pure speculation into a legitimate and rapidly expanding field of scientific inquiry.

A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, approximately nine point five trillion kilometres. Astronomers use this unit because conventional measures of distance become impractical when describing the vast gaps between stars, galaxies, and the other large-scale structures of the observable universe.

Black holes form when massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and collapse under their own gravity, compressing matter into an infinitely dense point called a singularity. Nothing that crosses the event horizon, not even light, can escape, making direct observation of a black hole's interior fundamentally impossible.